WHOOP Podcast - Master Your Golf Game: Key Habits To Improving On and Off The Green

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

On this week’s episode of the WHOOP Podcast, the WHOOP Research Series continues, sharing science-backed habits to help you improve your golf game. WHOOP Global Head of Human Performance, Principal Scientist Dr. Kristen Holmes and WHOOP Staff Research Scientist Dr. Greg Grosicki break down the groundbreaking new research linking recovery, sleep, and biometrics to the real-world performance of elite golfers. Drawing from one of the largest datasets in WHOOP research history, including 35,000+ nights of sleep data from 389 professional tour-level golfers, Dr. Holmes and Dr. Grosicki reveal how small improvements to sleep and recovery can translate to improved golf performance by more than a few strokes. From physical fitness to stress resilience, this study will help you rethink how you approach your golf game, on and off the green. Check out the full WHOOP Research Study here.(00:50) Using WHOOP To Collect Data on 389 Tour Level Golfers(02:00) Breaking Down The WHOOP Golf Study(03:44) Insights From The Largest Golf Data Set (06:29) The Impact of Recovery on a Golfer’s Game(12:30) Behind The Methodology: Looking At Key Biometrics Impacting Golfers(18:22) 5 Years Of Tournaments: Patterns in Metrics and Performance(23:49) Why Recovery Isn’t Just About Being In The Green(27:04) Associations Between Recovery and Performance Across Sport(32:56) Influential Impacts From HRV and RHR on Fitness and Performance(37:38) WHOOP and Mentality to Improve Your Golf Game(41:34) 3 Key Lessons To Improve Your Golf GameSupport the showFollow WHOOP:Sign up for WHOOP Advanced LabsTrial WHOOP for Freewww.whoop.comInstagramTikTokYouTubeXFacebookLinkedInFollow Will Ahmed:InstagramXLinkedInFollow Kristen Holmes:InstagramLinkedInFollow Emily Capodilupo:LinkedIn 

Over the last decade, three Masters tournaments were decided by a single stroke. Anything that these individuals can do to make their performance even one stroke better, they would kill for it. And that's what we were able to show in this paper. We looked at elite golf performance, eight years of data, over 500 competitive events. 389 tour level golfers. When you're looking at these golfers, you're thinking, how much more optimized can their biometrics? resting heart rate, their heart rate variability really beat. And what the study shows is where to actually apply your effort. If those course corrections are enough to be the difference between

winning or losing the masters, tell me they're not going to possibly help the average individual show up to be a better parent or show up to an interview stronger. Dr. Greg Grisicki. Dr. Kristen Holm, how are you today? So good to have you back. So good to be here. We have been just at a breakneck pace with regard to research. And we have published what I think is one of the most novel data sets ever in the space of human performance. Would you say that that's a fair characterization? Yeah.

Of all the papers I've published in my career, this is undoubtedly one of the most exciting projects. I think any of us have ever worked on. I know. There's no question. I mean, this is, when we started the process of contemplating this data set, I was like, damn, this could be, this could be really epic. And it turned out, you know, it's one of those things where I just want to say from, you know, off the bat as we move through the data, it's almost

too good to be true in the sense of, you know, we obviously, we work for whoop, right? So there's kind of this inherent conflict of interest, I suppose. That said, I'd love to start maybe there. So wearable-derived sleep and physiological metrics are associated with performance in professional golfers. This is a paper that was published in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance. Maybe just talk a little bit about the, just the overall kind of setup of this study. And what we did to make sure that none of these conflicts of interest kind of bubble up in the analysis and the presentation of the data. Yeah. No, I think one of the things that's so exciting about this study is that it largely reflects the history of what whoop is and what

who stands for, right? And why we built this product in the first place. Exactly. Exactly. And when you look at the original people who were wearing who, they were the most elite and the highest performers in the entire world. And so I think you have a good point in that when you look at the data, they do perhaps almost seem too good to be true. But then you also step back and think about, okay, here's a product that's been built on a decade of working with not only the most elite and high performers, but just one of the largest data sets in all of sport and biometrics and behaviors. And so when you have models and algorithms and teams of some of the smartest individuals in the world who have been working and to refine these products for over a decade,

I think this paper is really the culmination of those efforts. It's so incredibly validating, you know, I mean, I think for someone who, you know, I mean, I've personally been evangelized in recovery for a decade and a half, you know, and obviously a decade at whoop pounding the pavement trying to help athletes understand the opportunity that exists with understanding how your body is responding and adapting acutely to not just the training load, but life stress. And so when you zoom out, Greg, and you think about what this data set actually reveals that nobody has seen before, how would you kind of define that? Yeah, yeah. I think I'll take the words straight from your mouth and that you always go around saying that recovery is a way of being in the world, right? And when we look at the history of whoop, it was founded on the scientific principle

that we know tracking things like resting heart rate and heart rate variability and sleep ultimately do provide athletes and everyday users with an estimate of where they are relative to their selves, right? And we see that with a bounty of sports performance literature published with runners and triathletes and cyclists and football players and soccer players. But what hadn't really been explored until the golf study was what does that look like in a sport requiring a higher degree of possibly mental and psychological fortitude and far more precision? And that's what we were able to show in this paper definitively is that heart rate variability and resting heart rate and sleep and all the metrics that go into recovery don't just apply to endurance sports or don't just apply to football. But they apply, as we see in the results of this paper, very definitively, to golf performance. And we've seen that reflected by the responses we've gotten on social media when we've been posting about this.

And Will was kind enough to post about this. And you look at the responses from people. And it's validating when we have, you know, thousands of people showing up and saying, yep, this is like the experience I have with my data. And, you know, the plural of anecdote doesn't necessarily equal evidence. But when you have hundreds of people commenting and affirming that these results align with their daily observations, It provides yet another proof point of the robustness of the results. Yeah, well said.

And we're going to talk me for those, for folks listening right now, like, we're going to get into exactly how these data apply to your life. Because I think sometimes, like, when people hear, oh, this study was published on golfers, they're like, well, I don't even play golf, but I can promise you, listen to this podcast and you will understand how this is relevant in your life. If you're, you know, a parent navigating a challenging job, taking care of a sick parent. Like this, I promise you, you will, when you listen to this, you will understand how to get at some of these marginal gains in your own life. Yeah.

And in fact, you know, these are getting at the margins for the golfers. Whereas, you know, for the regular Jane and Joe, make some of these changes in your own life in terms of how you think about recovery and it will be transformational. I think that's an excellent point. And there's two points you make there to kind of get into the nitty gritty of the same. study is we looked at elite golf performance. And so there's a bit of a risk there in that we are looking at the highest level performers in the world. So how much? 389 tour level golfers. Yeah. As like an act, someone who came from academia and as an academic, it's literally a dream come true. To have 40 people in your study is years of work and years and a ton of labor. And that's

not to be little the value of that work. But yeah, I mean, to deal with 10 times more participants than that. And these aren't just, as you said, these aren't just the average Jack and Joe's, and nothing wrong with that. But these are the most elite performers in the world. And so when you think about that, you think of, okay, how much better can these people really get with their performance? Right. They're already close to a performance ceiling, you would imagine. Certainly. And so when you're looking at that population, I think, one, I think it helps to zoom out and look at what does a competitive golf tournament look like for those of us who might not be as familiar with golf, right? Generally, this is a four to five-day event, and each day they're playing one round of golf or 18 holes,

with an average score of somewhere maybe around 72 being the number of strokes they took, where lower score is better, they took fewer strokes to get it into the hole, right? So for more context there, if we look at the margins separating first from second or making the cut to not making the final day of play, they are very, very slim at the highest level of golf. We can look at the Masters tournament as a perfect example of this. Over the last decade, three Masters tournaments were decided by a single stroke. So you think about that. four days of golf, 18 holes per day. Each day we're taking 72 strokes. And the difference between winning and losing, a single stroke. And when you're the highest level of golf, it's just the question

of how much better can you really get. And furthermore, two of them were decided in sudden death overtime. So we have half of the Masters tournaments over the last decade being decided by either a single stroke or in sudden death. So anything that these individuals can do. to make their performance even one stroke better, they would kill for it. And so I think that provides a really nice context going into this. But then also when you're looking at these golfers, you're thinking, okay, these are the best of the best. How much better can they really sleep?

How much more optimized can their biometrics, their resting heart rate, their heart rate variability really be? These are not like really secretive things. These are metrics that they can use and they can leverage and they're wearing whoops. So theoretically, they are. So what kind of difference are we going to see when we look at associations between these sleep and biometric variables and their performance? Is there really anything left on the table? Or are we going to run into something in research where we'd call stealing effects?

And it happens all the time. Totally. If your physiology is already maximized, then it just can't be improved anymore. And so was that something we were going to see? And we didn't know until we started looking at the data. Right. I think that is an extraordinary point in that if you're not measuring and you have no visibility into how your body is responding and adapting to load.

If you have no visibility into your sleep, where do you even know to begin? And that's the obvious opportunity with a wearable technology like WOOP is that you can start to understand where you can gain some ground, you know, and what you can optimize for. And what the study shows is where to actually apply your effort. You know, and I think that is to me one of the biggest contributions WOOP has made in the last decade is helping people understand how to apply their effort

and what metrics to kind of focus on, what behaviors to focus on. They're going to move these metrics that we know now are associated with performance in a sport like golf. Yep. Right? So exciting. And I've heard the argument being made that it's like, okay. And you know, you see people on LinkedIn posting because they rise to the top of our

feeds. Yeah. They sure do. It's like, you know, here's my year and a half experience on Woop and it was great. And then they're saying, you know, like, okay, I. kind of know my body, and so I think I'm going to, like, take a little break. And, you know, I think there's, like, rationale behind that, but I also think it's important to realize that our bodies are always changing. They are always changing. And the aging process is not kind. And so,

you know, yeah, I think it's fine to take a break. But I think it's also good to realize that our bodies are constantly evolving and changing. And so the effect of something like alcohol or activity when you were 30 is not necessarily going to be the same as when you were now 35 or 40 or And there's constantly like new inputs, right? Like there, you know, like changes in the demands of your job or, you know, all of a sudden you have to commute. You know, you used to be hybrid. Now you're full time in the office. Like, I mean, there's just things that happen, right?

And in your life that are going to change your internal response to that external event. And having visibility into that allows you to course correct before it has maybe a real negative impact on your, you know, mental, physical or emotional health. Yeah, going back to the golf data, if those course corrections are enough to possibly be the difference between winning or losing the masters in people who are the most elite golfers in the world, then tell me they're not going to possibly help the average individual do something like show up to be a better parent at home or show up to an interview stronger and more robust and have better answers and responses to that. Be more present and more engaged. Exactly, which is something I think we're all aspiring to do. I know. I say it all the time because that is my constant like bar I'm driving for. So 389 tour level golfers. Just talk through just the study design and just some of the methodology before we kind of dig into the results. Yeah. Super unique data set. As you said, almost 400 professional level golfers, perhaps even more novel or adding to the complementing the novelty of that as we have eight years of data between 2017 and 2025 from over 500.

competitive events. 521. Yeah. So we're talking about what is unquestionably the largest, most unique and novel longitudinal data set for golf that has ever been studied or published in the scientific literature. And then we take those data and merge them with objective measures from data golf. And so this is providing us with measures on the green and in the fairway when these golfers are playing for something that is everything to their career, which is a key differentiation

between our data and previous literature. And not to belittle, studies that have been published on golf. And there have been a few looking at associations between physiology and mental control and golf performance. And most of those studies are coming from laboratory environments. So they'll bring people in and maybe measure their resting physiology, have them answer a couple of surveys and then set them up for putting in a lab. And while that's great and it's controlled and everyone's doing it in these control conditions. There ain't no crowd. Right. It's a totally different environment when you have a million dollars on the line. Just ask Rory. Yeah. It's just so hard to simulate real world conditions in a lab. Like I'm sorry. It just is hard. Exactly.

Yeah. Exactly. And another study that was very interesting with collegiate golfers actually that we were looking at as, you know, an interesting concept point going into this, they sleep restricted them. And then they asked them about their self-reported putting ability. Interesting data, different than what we were able to study here. And so ultimately what we did then is we evaluated associations among the biometrics and behaviors of these golfers and golf performance. And so let's talk a little bit, I think, about what variables we looked at in the study. So biometrics, everyone on whoop knows the key things we're looking at here, they're going into your recovery score are their resting heart rate and their heart rate variability.

So those are the key features there. And then we also looked at behaviors and particularly sleep. We really wanted to dial in on sleep. We think sleep has a lot of associations with physical performance, but we also know that it matters a ton for the mental game and things like mental control and psychological resilience when they miss a shot. I just ask or watch my golf game. It's not high when you're in the sands for the fifth time.

And so we want to look at sleep. And again, just bring novelty of our study here. We looked at sleep duration, which we knew would be important. But we also looked at sleep consistency. And that is one of the things that I think is most novel here. We looked at recovery as a whole as well. So we isolated obviously HRV, resting heart rate, kind of we pulled those out of the score, looked at them in isolation. And then we also looked at recovery as a whole, which is kind of like one of our hero algorithms that people that people use.

So talk about the performance metrics that we look at. So data golf really provide us this really rich, objective measures from these golfers during tournament play. In addition to their overall score. And again, just to keep in mind here that a lower scoring golf is better. That could be kind of confusing compared to other sports. We looked at their performance, well, putting. We looked at their performance getting to the green where they were doing their putting. We looked at the number of great shots they took.

And this can be kind of confusing because we looked at great shots and poor shots. When we're talking about that, obviously, great shots are shots where they made up shots over their competitors. So if most people made it to the fairway on the shot one and then shot two, they kind of got close to the green. and then shot three, they put it on the green. A great shot would be a golfer. He was able to bypass that intermediary step and just put it on the green. So we have to great shot as well as poor shots.

And then just explain strokes gained T to Green. People might not be familiar with that. Yeah. So we had strokes gained putting and strokes gained T to Green. And so those would be an example of individuals gaining strokes, which actually means that their scores getting lower, over their competitors.

So strokes gained going from the T to the green means getting onto the green where they're doing the putting and then strokes gains. Pudding is, you know, kind of implied by the name. They did a good job putting. And we also looked at poor shots, right? And so for an example of that, you could look at my golf game, for instance, times where they put it in a bunker or failed to get out of a bunker or perhaps more aptly. It happens in South Carolina a lot.

I hit it in a lake and I'm not going to get it because with all the all the alligators. That's what poor shots was. And so, yeah, it really provided us with this comprehensive, objective understanding of what their performance looked like when they were out in the real world playing in these tournaments that mattered everything to them. And a lot of money was on the line in these things. A lot of money is on the line. What's up, folks, if you are enjoying this podcast or if you care about health, performance, fitness, you may really enjoy getting a whoop. That's right. You can check out whoop at whoop.com. It measures everything around sleep, recovery, strain. And you can now sign up

for free for 30 days. So you'll literally get the high performance wearable in the mail for free. You get to try it for 30 days to see whether you want to be a member. And that is just at whoop.com. Back to the guests. You know, when you zoom out and consider a career in professional sports, it feels acute, right? Because you're, you know, you're talking millions of dollars or whatever.

And one shot could be a million dollars, right? Like, I don't even know what the monetary opportunity is, but it's a lot of money. But thinking about it in isolation like that really isn't the point of this study. So maybe talk about how when you when you kind of zoom out and you look at like, say, a five-year career of a golfer, why do these data matter? That kind of relates to a question that I saw arise a little bit on social media, in particular looking at how exactly we analyze these data.

And so I think it's important to contextualize that. Talk about that. Yeah. We have this rich longitudinal data. set and we really wanted to get at these population level insights. So what happens both within a golfer as they change from year to year and on average individuals had three competitive seasons or three touring seasons of data, which is fantastic. And then we were also able to compare golfers between one another. So golfers who on average have a lower resting heart rate or higher heart rate

variability, how do they perform to those with opposite of those metrics? And so what we strategically did here is we took golfers and analyzed their metrics by touring season or by years. So just as an example, golfer A had four years of data on the platform. We said, okay, in year one, his resting heart rate might have been 60 beats per minute and his average strokes in a round. And again, 18 holes in a round, around 72 strokes were taken was 72. year two. His resting heart rate went down to 58 beats per minute.

His recovery score went up. And his average strokes when he was playing a round of golf was 68. So it improved four strokes compared from year one and year two. And we did the same for year three and year four. And so when we're thinking about these findings, and I think the one finding that we have to discuss, and then we can get into the nitty gritty of the components that make it up, is recovery, right? Because that wraps everything into this one really nice,

integrated metric of their biometrics and their sleep behaviors. And just as a reminder for folks, sleep performance, respiratory rate, hurry variability, and resting heart rate are the components that make up our recovery algorithm. And they're all weighted kind of differently, but that's the recovery score on WOOP. Yeah. And so when we were publishing this paper, because we're publishing it in an academic journal, we had to acknowledge that recovery was a bit exploratory because it's not a metric where the individual components can be necessarily reproduced. It's not something like resting heart rate or heart rate variability. And so I think that kind of gets to what you were

talking about at the beginning of the podcast where to acknowledge like the conflicts of interest and the limitations. Is it recovery is a proprietary whoop thing. And not that it can't be done by other people, although it's unlikely to be done as well as we do it. Just, you know, my personal bias there. But when we looked at all the metrics, resting heart rate, heart rate variability, sleep, duration, sleep consistency, none of them were as strongly associated with golf performance as recovery. And so that's obviously extremely compelling behind recovery, but the truth is, if recovery

is done right, that's exactly how it should be. It takes all of these metrics and gives members. and people who are using whoop one gold standard proof point to focus on, which is one of the arguably hardest things to do for wearable technology.

Members are provided with this flood of data. And so can we take that? Can we distill it down to give members something a gold standard North Star that is actionable, right? Because it's great to have

resting heart rate, heart rate variability, sleep duration, sleep consistency, but maybe I fix one and then the other goes to shit. It's challenging and we're juggling a lot of balls. And at least these data suggests that focusing on recovery is that North Star is going to be the most effective if in the context of this study we're looking at associations with golf performance. And so the high level there was that for each touring season, a golfer had a recovery

score of 10 percentage points higher. So if I wake up, let's say, at an 80% recovery versus a 70% recovery, on average, in the mornings where I'm playing golf in a season, I played on average per round half a stroke better. Half a stroke per round. Keep in mind with these golf tournaments, I'm playing on average maybe four rounds. So when we look at how that cumulatively scales over the course of a competitive event, that's two-stokely. Bring that back to what we said with the Masters tournament, where in the last decade, over half of these winners versus losers have been decided by a single stroke. 10% point recovery could be the difference between winning and losing.

This goes back to our original thesis that recovery is kind of a way of being in the world, right? And so it's not about being green every day. No. Why don't you unpack that? And just to zoom out, you know, I've had a gazillion conversations with, with, you know, sports scientists and strength and conditioning coaches and people who are working with athletes on the daily. And, you know, there's always like, oh, recovery's this black box.

But I'm like, you know what? It has practical utility. You know, there's something very practically useful about this snapshot in just a zoomed out view of how you're recovering and responding generally to the demands of life. And the fact is when we look at efficiency and ice hockey and exit bat blocks to the exit ball volvelocs to the exit ball volveloc. velocity, free throw percentage, run times, swing times, blah, blah, blah, blah, recovery correlates to all of those metrics that people care about in performance. And we're able to show this and publish these data in golf. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think it's a great point you make about always being in the green. We would obviously love to always be in the green. But maybe not, though. Is it actually desirable? You need stimulus. Make it abundantly clear. It's not possible unless our physiology is literally improving.

day over day. And show me someone who, if your resting heart rate is 60 beats per minute, and if it gets lower day after day, sorry, you've died in 60 days. Right. Like, it's not, it cannot happen. Right. And so if we think about recovery in the context of, let's say, training for a marathon and not everyone has necessarily trained for a marathon, but I think we all know that to train for a marathon, you have to beat your body up a little bit. You have to give the body the exposure to repeated bouts of stimuli that are going to prepare it to show up on the day of the marathon where it can perform at its best. And meet those demands.

Right. After we do a, if we do a really long run on Sunday, which is something that's very common amongst runners, it would be surprising and probably untrue if we were to wake up on the Monday after doing a 20-mile long run and see that our recovery is still green. And if that is indeed the case, then you probably could have run longer or harder during your long run on Sunday than you actually did. There's, you know, the graphic that circulates all over social media about progress not being linear. And recovery should look exactly like that. To show up at our best, we have to tax the system. And if we're not taxing the system, then recovery, we're not going to be being our optimal selves, really.

And we do see, I forget which data set you were looking at, Greg, but essentially the folks who are kind of mapping strain with recovery, basically listening to strain coach actually get fitter. Yeah, I believe that was Bill and Jane's analysis looking at people who are meeting their strain recommendations, which is exceeding and not meeting. And I think that was particularly, just like you said, that they, They saw associations between meeting strain recommendations and changes in resting heart rate over the course of the year. Yeah, which is, you know, just again, you know, another, you know, shout out to just some of the coaching that's just embedded in the whoop experience.

Let's kind of keep talking about this mindset around recovery. So just if you want to keep kind of going as deep as you want to go, thinking about, okay, how does this, you know, transfer to, you know, folks who are not professional athletes? Yeah. So obviously in this study, we had this incredible observation that we observed that the professional golfers who had the 10% of point higher recovery were shooting half a stroke better. But I think, and this kind of goes back to the conversation we were having early on in the podcast, that WOOP was originally developed for. high performers and when it was originally developed it might not have been golf that we necessarily had in mind oh we're going to really set up a recovery score that when you see green you're going to be on the green on the golf course i don't think uh will's a genius but i don't think that was his initial thought when he was sitting in the library coming up with whoop um but but i think

the fact that we observed the compelling associations we did in this study And that there's consistency going from things like running or triathlon or football, which, you know, football and golf are both sports. But besides that, I don't see great similarities between the Alabama football team. Or let's choose a better one, the Indiana football team. Yeah. And Rory, when he's out on the golf course. Yeah. And so if indeed we're seeing associations between recovery and performance in those very dissimilar, although still elite athletes, then I think we be amiss if we didn't assume that it's the same principles that we can use to guide performance at the highest level of sport, that we can also use to guide lifestyle choices and performance for people.

like you and I. Yeah. I just wrote a 320 page book about recovery. You know, just because it's that important. Yeah. You know, it's, you know, and I think modern life makes it really hard for most individuals to manage load and recovery, strain and recovery in a way that is intentional and and really produces functional adaptation over time.

And that's, you know, you could argue, well, it's just aging, but talk a little bit about that. You know, how does recovery help slow down the aging process? One of the unique things about wearable tech that we kind of talked about earlier is that it may yield insights into your recovery, that you didn't really know existed. Taking that multivitamin consistently. Right.

Or going to bed or waking up at the same time. Yeah. The days you spend more time outside versus indoor. Exactly. Or days you spend time parenting or sleeping with a dog in your bedroom or a cat in the bedroom. Right. And so I think that's one of the values of that.

And kind of going hand in hand with that, the, the aging process, right? Like you said, and the funny thing about aging is it's inexorable and it's inevitable. We can't escape it. We're all going to experience it, hopefully, if we're lucky. Yeah. And so how can we translate the insights that we get into our physiology from our behaviors,

almost 200 of them, to understand how to age in a way that, is under our own control as much as it possibly can. Yeah. Yeah. And I think being intentional about this, I think, dance, you know, between the load we're putting on our body and making sure that we're mapping that with appropriate levels of rest. Obviously, the biggest opportunity for rest comes that, you know, during the biological night and making sure that we're getting the sleep that we need. It's as consistent as possible. But also opportunities throughout the day to build in many, moments of rest, you know, where we can break up that stress accumulation in a way that allows us to fall asleep and stay asleep, that allows us to, you know, go into our next task with a little

bit more focus, a little bit more, you know, presence and energy. So I think thinking about ways that you can build in this concept of recovery throughout the day is, is also, I think, probably one of the ways our elite athletes are starting to think about recovery, as really as you say, as a force multiplier, you know, not as just this nice to have. Yeah.

Yeah. And in society today, it's easy to get stuck in this rat race of always chasing the next thing. And like if we're chasing a goal, like constantly being working at working towards that goal, but without rest, like you said, then we're never,

we're ever going to show up our best selves. So how can we get that? Ambition, striving, you know, all of that is amazing, right? Especially when it aligns with, you know, the things that you believe in and care about, your values. There's nothing better than that, right? But even when it's perfectly aligned, you still need to make time for recovery. And that's what we quantify.

Yep. Yeah. No, certainly. You know, we talked about the recovery score and kind of how to think about that. the context of the study, why don't you kind of break apart, hurry variability and resting heart rate and tell us what we saw. Yeah, we looked again, like I said a little bit earlier, at relations between athletes who had a lower resting heart rate. Resting heart rate and heart rate variability provide this nice complementary evaluation of cardiac autonomic modulation, which is a really

complex way of saying basically how the nervous system is working, and we're measuring that at the level of the heart. So basically how the nervous, yeah, yeah, the the association or relation between or a control of heart rate via the nervous system. And by that, we can kind of look at system how the nervous system is working, which is nice. Resting heart rate obviously is something that's been studied for decades, years, centuries. And with that, we looked at did golfers who had a lower resting heart rate perform better. And then in season, where resting heart rate was lower, did they perform better? And the answer to both of those was yes. What does that indicate? Well, perhaps something with fitness, lower stress, less travel

demands, what have you? We can't actually be certain, but it's pretty compelling evidence to chase behavioral factors or participate in lifestyle behaviors that are lower airing our resting heart rate. So obviously the fitter you are, you have a moment where even just walking up a hill to the green, you know, where you have to then engage a put, right? Like your heart rate's going to rise and then the fitter you are, the faster it comes down, your heart rate recovery, right? Recovery is better. Yep. Your heart recovery is better. And I can't imagine. I mean, I think that's probably what these data show, right, is those individuals who are fitter, who have a better, you know, a better resting heart rate are able to get into, are able to physiologically, which then impacts your mind,

right? Like are able to kind of get into a kind of a state of being that allows them to engage the put or the drive, whatever it might be, better. Yeah. And I love indexing resting heart rate as a measure or a proxy for fitness in this data set. Yeah, totally. And I would argue that what you just provided was a excellent.

example of how fitness might matter within a particular round of golf that these athletes were playing. Right. I think it's presumably possible that fitness might even matter more if we consider the fact that these individuals, these athletes are playing four consecutive days. We know with absolute certainty that fitness is, and I think, I would say I think, at least, the best buffer for stress and being resilient to stress. I couldn't imagine the stress of having to show up four days in a row as a professional golfer at my best, competing against the world best for either unbelievable amounts of money

or going home to my family with zero change in the pocket and a whole bunch of very disappointed sponsors. And so having that baseline level of fitness going into these tournaments is going to be huge. It's going to make them more resilient to stress. And then when on the fourth day, they're competing in that sudden death tournament, you're thinking about energy and resilience and who's going to show up to make that final put on the green in sudden death, for instance. The fitter athlete is going to make it there in a better, more well-rested state than the athlete who's less fit, who they're traveling to get to these events, right? Just that stress resilience that comes from fitness reflected by having a lower resting heart rate?

I can't imagine that that wasn't impactful for these individuals. Not to mention the fitter you are, the faster you were going to be able to recover from that four-day. Between competitive events. Yeah. And that recovery is not simple when these events are not played in a single location all over the world. Some of the LinkedIn chatter, I think they were talking about one of the golfers who's notoriously, he's retired, but was notoriously unfit, you know, smoke and drank. and you're like, but he was still good. And I was like, my point is how much better could he have been potentially, right?

Like what was he leaving on the table? And that's always, you know, when I talk to professional athletes, that's always my kind of, well, I'm already really good. You know, in their mind, I'm already close to my performance ceiling. And I'm like, well, what are you leaving on the table? I mean, that's the question here, right? Yeah. Yeah. And for people like me who might be listening who are already really bad at golf, but there are people who will go.

on these vacations to play four days of golf, right? And if you want your fourth day to be your best possible golf, then being a little more fit going into that vacation, you're going to be less likely to get sick. There's a whole bunch of benefits that could come from having a lower resting heart rate as a proxy of fitness that are, could certainly be causal in this association. That's another really great point. We've seen this in other data sets as well where, you know, again, people who are paying attention to recovery and building in appropriate amounts of rest relative to the load that they're putting on their body are more available to train and compete, right? And I don't know if we're able to kind of make a comment about this particular

data set with regard to availability to compete. But to your point, when you are chronically fit, you know, your burden of illness and injury is going to go down. That is just those are the facts, right? Your ability to manage the travel and just, you know, all of the things that go and just just take an executive, right, who's having, I mean, I travel all over the world, right? And, you know, I think one of the reasons why I'm able to maintain my health is I just in between events, you know, in between travel, like I'm just really focused on doing everything that I can to control what I can control and stay as fit as possible. So I'm resilient to

a lot of these vagaries. So yeah, I think all of this is, I think, applicable to anyone who's just trying to, you know, pay down disease burden, illness burden, injury burden. Yeah, when I go on vacation, I'm not really trying to get sick, right? So listening to Woop Coach and doing what I can to improve my fitness going on vacation is going to be the difference between getting or not getting sick on vacation. It seems like a value add to me. Totally. What do these findings say about the mental game?

We've talked a little bit about it, but we talked about physical resilience and how that impacts fourth day, the mental resilience. Is there anything else you want to add just on the mental side of the game? Yeah, there are previous literature showing associations between these measures of cardiac autonomic function that we talked about, resting heart rate and heart rate variability and things like mental control and mental resilience and even heart rate variability and then how we react to stressful events. And as a golfer, as a person at work, there are going to be things that come up in your day-to-day life that are going to annoy you. And having higher or better

superior cardiac autonomic control, better autonomic modulation as those inevitability. arise is going to set us up for greater success. And so probably just like we saw in this where we saw within individuals, mind you, associations between improvements in heart rate variability and better play, which again had been demonstrated in the sundry of other sports, but now we're demonstrating it for the first time in golf. And there had been laboratory studies done looking at how actually heart rate variability responds to like competitive putting and it goes down, as you would imagine, because people are getting stressed. But now we're showing definitively associations between improvements in that measure of index reflection of cardiac autonomic control and golf performance, which is super cool.

So more variability, more capable of adapting and responding to the demands of the game of golf. Certainly. It's epic. All right, Greg, you've given our listeners a lot to chew on here. If you were to just sum it up and bring us home here with just, you know, three tight pieces of advice that can help someone be, you know, three strokes better in their life. What would that be? I think first we can start out by acknowledging that if the learnings from this study are enough to make the difference between winning or losing the masters in the most elite performers in the world, then they're probably also enough to make a difference in my life, your life, and the life of most of us around us.

So well said. So I would say that's number one. Number two would be the importance of rest and recovery and not looking at recovery as something that's necessarily going to be linear. That recovery needs to be supported by adequate rest. And we saw that when we looked at associations between sleep behaviors and performance. in these golfers that golfers who particularly slept more consistently performed better both between and with an individual's on the golf course. Amazing.

And then number three would be the value of fitness in golf. I think fitness is something that might be undervalued in something like golf where it's pretty easy to get in a golf cart if we're going around 18 holes. But, you know, maybe it's worth actually walking. I know when we're walking, like, walking 18 holes of golf is getting like five or six miles. My 93-year-old grandpa walks golf and gets a 20 strain for doing it. And so if he can do it, so can you. And so, you know, if that walking the golf course is enough to boost your fitness and your V-O-2 max

and think about where that might make an impact both on the golf course in your play, but also in your life through getting sick less and being more resilient. Love that. Greg, thank you so much for just all the contributions you made to this body of work. I think this is an incredible contribution to science and to our understanding of human performance and just really grateful. So thank you for the conversation today. I know listeners are going to love it.

Thank you for the opportunity. And a big thanks to our team as well as just the larger, group at Whoop for supporting our research. We wouldn't be able to do it without them. Totally. Thank you. If you enjoyed this episode of the Whoop podcast, please leave a rating or review. Check us out on social at Whoop at Will Ahmed.

If you have a question to what's answered on the podcast, email us, podcast to Whoop.com. Call us 508-433-4952. If you think about joining Whoop, you can visit Whoop.com. Sign up for a free 30-day trial membership. New members can use the code Will, W-I-L-L, to get a $60 credit on W-W-A-Ccessaries when you enter the code at checkout. That's a wrap, folks. Thank you all for listening.

We'll catch you next week on the WooP Podcast. As always, stay healthy and stay in the green.